Category: Personal

Personal

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Running Man

I’m a runner.

This is something that I rediscovered when I was 34. I did quite a lot of running as a boy, right up until the time I left school. Actually, I slacked off at the beginning of year twelve, but that’s another story. I became fairly sedentary in my early 20s and my weight gradually ballooned, even when I became a commuter cyclist in the mid-1990s.

In mid-2002, I began walking at lunchtime with friends around the Tan. I saw quite a few runners and, after a while, decided I would join them. The first time, I got about 100m before thinking I was going to collapse and die of a heart attack or exhaustion. Mind you, I was about 140kg at that stage. I thought: “it’s OK, it’ll just get easier each time”, so I tried again a few days later and got about 50m. But after that, it did get better.

I ran the City to Surf in 2003, a half-marathon in 2005 and a marathon in 2006.

But in February this year, I stubbed by left little toe as I walked past a door. It really hurt, as it does, but a few hours after the pain of the stubbed toe had subsided, the whole outer side of my foot felt like it had been given half a dozen good whacks with a cricket bat. Walking was painful for a few weeks, and running was completely out of the question. I waited about 6 weeks, and tried running again, but the pain was still very much there. So, in May, I went to see a Podiatrist at the Olympic Park Sports Medicine Clinic. It was time to put the feet in for a service. I cannot recommend those folks highly enough. My Podiatrist confirmed what I had long suspected: my feet were flat as pancakes and if I wanted to keep running, I needed orthotics. She also suggested I rest the toe a bit longer and took an x-ray just in case, which came back negative. So I got the orthotics and rested the foot. Took my medicine.

The good (no, great!) news is that I’m back running again. I’ve run 3 times in the past two weeks (10min, 20min, 25min), and while I’m pleasantly surprised that I haven’t lost all my fitness after several months without running, it’s pretty tough when I get to the 20-minute mark or so.

It’s such an incredibly good feeling to be running again. When you are something and you can’t do it, it’s so frustrating, even depressing. But when you get back to doing it again, well, there aren’t too many things that feel so good!

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Schools and Bombs

(paraphrased from a bumper sticker seen this morning)

I will be happy when schools have all the money they need to educate our children and the military has to hold fetes and garage sales to buy bombs.

Why, as a society, do we get our priorities so completely backwards?

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The Ultimate Water-Saving 2-Minute Shower

My recipe for cutting your shower to two minutes while still enjoying it. This will save a lot of water and help you to feel really good about yourself.

Optional extras:

a. To reduce water consumption: shave your head. No need to shampoo, condition or blow-dry. And no bad-hair days!
b. Purchase a shower timer. Approx $10-15 from your local hardware store.

c. Use a Rinnai Infinity instantaneous gas hot water service. This lets you set the hot water temperature – to the degree – which means that you don’t have to mix hot and cold, nor do you heat the water to 60-70deg and then cool it back down again. Or better yet, get solar hot water.

Now, to the recipe:

  1. Set shower timer to 2 minutes.
  2. Start timer.
  3. Start shower.
  4. Wet your body all over.
  5. Turn off shower.
  6. Pause timer.
  7. Use soap or your preferred product to lather and clean all over.
  8. Resume timer.
  9. Turn on shower.
  10. Rinse off.
  11. Enjoy remaining 30-60s of luxuriating hot water. If you choose to grow hair, use this time to rinse out the shampoo, then repeat steps 5-10 for conditioner.
  12. Turn shower off when timer indicates, or earlier for extra brownie points.

Additional water-saving tips:

  • Guys, don’t run the tap while you’re shaving. Just run a little hot water into the basin and use that.
  • Everyone, don’t run the tap while you’re brushing your teeth.

I managed to have a fantastic shower while camping recently using a bucket and about 7-8 litres of rainwater, using essentially the steps above.

Next task: to convince lunatic farmers that inland Australia is not an appropriate place to grow rice! Sheesh…

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I’m baaaack!

Back from 5 weeks vacation, camping in National Parks, caravan parks and friend’s backyards, and visiting friends and family. We all had an amazing time that I’ll write about over the coming weeks.

Returning home was surprising – our home of nine years looked eerily unfamiliar even though nothing had changed. I think that there’s a length of time, perhaps about two or three weeks, that is the length of your ‘now’. ‘Recent memory’, if you like. Most vacations aren’t long enough to reach that point, so you don’t get such a disruptive experience when you return to normal life. But I definitely went beyond that point with this holiday.

We drove back into Melbourne late on a Tuesday afternoon, and I was taken aback by the sheer number of people, their pace, and what seemed to me to be the tunnels of vision that they were racing down. The pace out in the countryside is definitely slower and people seem to look around them as they go about their day. Maybe it’s just me and the fact that I’ve been spending weeks marvelling over the size of the country and the sky – we really don’t have much sky in the city – but it was something I noticed immediately.

But it is good to be back in our comfortable beds, good to be able to go to the market and get a proper range of fruit and veg (and at reasonable prices!), and just enjoy all the things that were familiar before we left and are becoming familiar again.

And I’ve got a lot of gardening to do…